By William Van MeterNEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE • Saturday November 16, 2013 7:19 AM

NEW YORK — It was 10 p.m., and the floor of the basketball court at a Salvation Army center in Brooklyn was a blur of roller-skate-powered counterclockwise motion.

As hip-hop blared and flashing lights illuminated the hoops, a woman in cheetah stretch pants skated as if running in place in front of a large fan, her hair blowing behind her like a video vixen’s.

Those who weren’t as comfortable on eight wheels slowly circled the outskirts, their arms outstretched for balance like pelicans about to take off. The inner circle was reserved for the hard-core skaters showing off their skills. A novice fell hard, and one of the rink attendants blew his whistle and blocked an oncoming train of interlocked teenagers from barreling over her.

It was a Wednesday night at Crazy Legs Skate Club, a weekly dance party on wheels that attracts all levels of the roller strata.

“Crazy Legs is special,” said Dyana Winkler, a filmmaker. “You have hipsters coming off the G train, mixed with Central Park skaters in their 60s and 70s, and African-Americans who have developed a style that’s very different from disco and very different from what the Central Park skaters do. So it’s this melting pot. Apart from this converted basketball court, there are no other rinks in the city. It’s forced these communities that would have been separate to come together.”

Winkler and her partner, Tina Brown, are making a documentary, United Skates, tracking the evolution of skate dancing, including the multiday “skate jams” taking place across the country.

“It’s a lifestyle,” said Lance Byrdsong, 19. “We go skating three times a week.”

Roller disco is well past its heyday of the 1970s and ’80s, when celebrities such as Michael Jackson and Cher would lace up, and there was a deluge of skate-themed films and episodes on TV shows. Skating plateaued in New York, a victim of high rents and liability insurance.

“All of us went into fits of sadness,” said Lynna Movingstar, an actress, who was taking a break from the Crazy Legs floor. She had silver fingernails, and her hair was pulled up into a mohawk braid.

“I’ve been skating 18 years,” she said. “Skating was like going to church. When the rinks were open, I skated seven nights a week.”

Crazy Legs helps fill the void. Sebastian Silva, the Chilean director of The Maid, is a three-year habitue.

“It was like I found heaven,” he said.

Silva, 34, recently shot a scene for his next film, Nasty Baby, at Crazy Legs. An autobiographical comedy-drama about a gay couple trying to have a child, it stars Kristen Wiig.

“Roller skating has a 10-year cycle,” said Jim McMahon, head of Roller Skating Association International, a trade group of rink owners.

“It rises to a peak and slowly goes down and rises. We’re not on the peak; we’re on the rising.”